Character Creation Screen Update
The Alliance finally have a new character creation screen! The Pandaren got a small update to make their character creation screen a little less sparse as well.

Beta Class Balance Analysis

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

What is the final word on DoT specs? There is no doubt that "Split DPS" can influence a guild to take a DoT class over burst but encounters like Spine of DW can also encourage guilds to take burst dps over a DoT class
Multi-dotting is a perk. On some encounters, dot classes will do well. If they are doing 150% of the damage of non-dot specs, then that's not cool. We're not trying to stamp it out though.

However, I have done raid testing on two healing classes (shaman/paladin), and in both cases, regen feels too weak, and definitely feels weaker than it did starting T11 raids in blue gear. It feels like you need to spam your low throughput/slow/efficient heal more than ever. This is surprising given the fact that we are scaled to first tier epic gear levels for raid testing. It feels like either regen cooldowns or Spirit scaling needs to be bumped up across the board.
That's useful feedback. We just need to make sure that the problem is really healer mana regen and not the fact that players may not fully understand the encounters yet (so are taking more damage than intended from stuff that is supposed to be interrupted or avoided), or that certain encounter abilities are overtuned.

Death Knight (Forums)Another issue is our aoe threat. Currently blood boil and DnD hit like wet noodles and that creates a lot of issues with aoe threat. The first few seconds are also an issue. Having to apply diseases to get the weakened blows debuff on the mobs can be a pain compared to the other tanks. With the few seconds time of getting diseases up can cause even more aoe threat problems.
We'll look at Death and Decay. It was fine the last time we looked at it, and I believe Unholy still uses it as part of a single-target rotation, so that implies the numbers can't be too far off for Blood.

There was at least one bug with Blood Boil (the disease bonus only affected the base points, not the AP scaling) and we buffed it even beyond that. It should hit much, much harder now.

Incidentally, the biggest problem with Army of the Dead was pet scaling, which was apparently broken for almost every class. Our apologies. We have that fixed up now so you should be able to evaluate the results soon.

Monk (Forums)That bears the question: Is everyone else too low, or are they too high?
Mistweavers are too high. Other healers are about right.

While we are trying to hold things relatively stable for a bit so that you can really dig into rotations, monks are new, so they are less stable than other specs. There are still bugs and unimplemented tech that we need to make them work correctly. We still appreciate monk feedback -- we are emphatically not saying don't bother -- but take monk numbers with an even larger grain of salt than other classes.

Rogue (Forums)The current way Sanguinary Vein works is like how Bandit's Guile works on live which you said was to punishing. Is there anything going to be done to make this mechanic less punishing to match what was done for the other 2 rogue specs?
We want Sub to use Rupture (and recently buffed it). We don't want Sub to get the full benefit of Sanguinary Vein without having Rupture going. The old Bandit's Guile was a stacking mechanic, which feels redundant with poison stacking mechanics and combo point stacking mechanics. Having to have ability X up before you can do max damage doesn't cross the same line for us.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Scarlet Halls (Challenge Mode)
In this beta build, we will be unlocking the Challenge mode for the Scarlet Halls instance.

A few relevant testing notes:

You must have completed the Heroic version of the dungeon once in order to attempt the challenge mode.

Item level will be normalized to 463.

There is no queue system for challenge modes; groups must be formed manually and you must zone in from the outside world.

The current Gold/Silver/Bronze times are not final.

While the challenge is active, the group leader may Reset the dungeon at any time via a drop-down accessible by right-clicking your unit frame.

You may want to dig up those dusty keybindings for things like crowd control and interrupts.

Please use this thread to share feedback regarding the dungeon, including information on group composition and completion times. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mists of Pandaria and...it's point?Well I do love exploration and adventure.
There will be lore. Oh yes, there will be.

After questing through every zone I could count on 1 hand, maybe I'd need a couple fingers from the other, the quests that had direct ally vs horde story to it. The rest is what wow has always been, new factions, that send you out collecting and killing monsters.

If there is a war going on between ally and horde in Pandaria, there must be some island still shrouded in mist and they're all fighting over there.I should add, or it hasn't been implemented yet.
Actually, let me address this a bit for you: First off, we didn't want to force anyone to PvP that doesn't want to PvP. So, our focus is on creating opportunities for those on PvP realms just by the guard changes we hope to implement as well as having solid hubs of activity.

Second off, I don't want to give away too much, but the release of Mists of Pandaria and what you see in beta is just the beginning. Like any expansion we've done before, you can expect a patch (or two etc.) that continue to move things forward. The launch is about learning about Pandaria, what the intrusion of the Horde and Alliance (and their conflict) means for the land and the denizens within it. That would be the "explore" and "adventure" portion I mentioned. It would also seem a bit odd if that was all we focused on in Pandaria given that we don't need to go to a new land for there to be conflict between the two factions, right? (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

PvP Power Not Active Outside of Battlegrounds and Arenas?
Is this testing or speculation? Because PvP Power and PvP Resilience should work anywhere with regard to DPS, but of course only when you are attacking or being attacked by other players.

The only thing that doesn't work is PvP Power-fueled healing. At the moment, you only gain the healing benefit when in BGs and Arenas. The reason is because that we don't want PvP gear to be super effective for PvE content (useful is fine, but super effective is not).

That design goal is easily met for damage dealers, because they won't benefit from PvP Power when damaging creatures. Unfortunately, there isn't a simple check for us to determine if a healer is healing damage done by PvP or PvE. In an Arena or BG you can make that assumption, but in the outdoor world you may be engaging in world PvP, or you may just be questing.

We are considering just letting PvP Power affect healing everywhere but dungeons and raids. That would solve world PvP and only risk unbalancing group questing and world bosses. Even the world bosses probably don't represent a huge game balance risk, given that the option always exists to get tons of players together to zerg them. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Mists of Pandaria PvP
A nice video Braindeadly, you make some nice points and do understand that we are listening to the community and we actively pass feedback on to the developers in the US. As you can see in the recent blog on "The Future of PvP in Mists of Pandaria" we are focused on and want to have more PvP content than ever before. Hopefully there will be even more information coming that we can communicate about future of PvP.

The thing is, while we all totally agree with you, right now it feels like close to nothing is done with our feedback (just look at Rasen's thread, only reply we get is 'hey, looks good, keep discussing').
Generally any post from us can easily derail a thread, we did not want to cause this as there was some great feedback and wanted it to continue. As stated above we are actively passing on feedback to the developers.

Please do continue to add your feedback and thoughts as well as the discussion of them to this thread

A lot of these questions I sadly do not have the answers to at this time and let's also not turn this into a Q&A thread. I meant by my last post that we try to give answers to more specific questions as they occur through normal discussion. I will answer what I can from the questions raised:

Is there a spectator mod in progress? That's something alot of people want to both kill time and to improve their game in general.
There is a custom UI that was created by fans specifically for spectating to commentate arena tournaments, however that requires the people to queue for 5v5 matches and the two spectators per team to die There are currently no plans for an official spectator mode to be released at this time.

Is blacklisting going to apply to Arenas to? As you might read these forums you can't really ignore all the RoV & Dalaran map threads.
At this time blacklisting is not a part of the arena queuing system, but maybe this will change in the future.

2) What are your plans to encourage world PvP in Pandaria for especially high-end PvP'ers. Is it possible there could be PvP objectives that gave higher Conquest caps or other epic, important rewards?
No flying mounts until level 90 and an item that can dismount players, world bosses which factions will be competing against each other to kill, areas that players will want to gain control of such as the black market auction house and also us just wanting to have people back out in the world. Generally the most enjoyable world PvP is something that occurs spontaneously because you encounter others randomly, not because of stuff that the designers put in to create conflict. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Pet Battle AvailabilityI really want to level up my pet...
Soon! We are very close to getting it on beta. Give us a little bit more time to crush the big bugs and then you guys can have at it. =) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Why does Blizzard Nerf Dungeons?
Let's please agree to avoid making this into a "hardcore vs. casual" debate.

The long and short of it is simply we want to make sure that we provide opportunities for as many people as possible to see the content. As I mentioned previously, most people who are "cutting edge" are through the content before it ever gets any adjustments. From there, it's about getting more people through the content (as appropriate). It really doesn't do us a lot of good to create content that only a very small portion of the community will ever get to see.

Yes, Raid Finder is there to help people who want to see that content, but many like to also move on from there into Normal and Heroic as a part of their gear progression as well. Giving them the opportunity isn't necessarily a bad thing.

We have a variety of discussions going on here and what I'm seeing boils down to this:

People feel their own accomplishments are diminished if others are given the opportunity at a "lesser" difficulty to do the same thing.

People feel that players who are given a "leg up" will be less capable of doing the more difficult content because they were given the leg up to begin with.

People are concerned about not getting the challenge they seek.

Accomplishments often can be seen by the type of gear you've managed to get, or the Achievements you've earned. Those can't be taken away from you and if someone else happens to earn those, then great. While the game has a competitive nature at points, not everyone is going to be "first", but hopefully most everyone will get a shot at being able to take part in the experience anyway. Challenge modes will be available for those that want to show off their ability as solid players. The bonuses though, will be purely cosmetic. It's all about the bragging rights and transmog gear. (We'll be able to put out more information on all of this before long to remind everyone of it.)

On the second issue, if we don't get people the chance to try to begin with, then they will never have the opportunity to improve. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of a sort for many players who automatically believe that someone isn't trying just because they may have rusty skills (from taking time away) or may not know their class well enough because they haven't had the time to truly learn it or a variety of other issues. What it comes down to though, is that if you don't give them the shot, they will never learn at all. They may not even want to learn if their experience in attempting to do so has been a poor one. You've got to let someone up now and then instead of keeping them knocked down if you want them to rise to the occasion. What you may think is a "bad" player may just be inexperienced. You won't know until they are given the chance. Are there people who may not catch on as quickly or who may not necessarily try? Sure. But that is not the majority. It's just select "bad" experiences or your own mindset setting you up for bad that makes this so.

Last, the challenge will be there if you take it for yourself. If you can't be first, you can at least be one of the first. And beyond that, there will be challenge modes or Achievements worth getting.

So yes, we will make adjustments to the difficulty to give more people the opportunity to progress whether they are casual, hardcore, experienced, new, veteran, returning players, what have you. We want people to be able to play the game that so many have invested so much time and effort into developing. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Battle.net Balance and WoW Subscription

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Hey Blizzard, if I can earn 80 dollars, with that money in Battle.net can I buy your games? like SC2?
Purchasing through your Battle.net account should allow you to use your Battle.net balance. It's not an option on the Blizzard Store, though, which is separate from digital purchases directly on your account.

I'm just curious as to why I cannot pay for my WoW subscription with it. Seems really silly.
We're working on it!

Guild Wars 2 Release Date Annoucned
ArenaNet has finally announced that Guild Wars 2 will be released on 8/28/12, with Headstart access on 8/25/12. If you want more frequent updates, check out GW2Guru or find some other players to play with in our Guild Wars 2 forum.

It's kind of ironic that the head enchants were taken away because Blizz didn't want people to grind rep. *chuckles to self*
Yet am fine with this. Also people will only have to grind them for tier1 of Pandaria, possibly? Will wait and see.

Am excited, pretty much have a goal on how to get gear from farming, dungeons, heroic dungeons and rep/valor.

Way too much valor coming from way too many sources to not have some gear. I also dont recall them saying there wouldnt be. Instead they said you could use it to upgrade items. I think its a way to make it useful once you get your initial valor gear.

am I missing something, or is this an absolutely insane number of dailies, randoms, whatever, to do per day?

They are giving you multiple ways to cap, if raiding you also get valor points as well. Do 1-2 5 man randoms a day and you are capped. I will most likely spread it around though, 3-5 dailies, some scenarios throw in a Challenge mode here and there and you will be kept busy for quite some time.

am I missing something, or is this an absolutely insane number of dailies, randoms, whatever, to do per day?

Yes, that is an insane number to have to do per day. I think MMO-Champ worded the sentence completely wrong. It would mean you'd only get 1 valor point per quest if it took 150 a day to get 1000 valor points per week, and 2-3 valor points per random dungeon. I think it should really be: You can get ~150+ valor points per day from quests, 60 per random dungeon, 30 per scenario (or possibly 30 valor points per day from scenarios), and 40-60 valor points per challenge mode dungeon.

---------- Post added 2012-06-30 at 01:14 AM ----------

Originally Posted by Playintrafic

What happened to "valor points are no longer to buy gear but to upgrade gear"

That was my first thought too. Something seems off, though. Not only do you have to gain rep to buy them, but you have to use valor points for them too, rather than gold or some faction token?

Liking that new character screen. A lot better than the current one IMO

GW2 looks really cool, but i dunno if it's for me. Gonna wait for a trial. From some of the folks who i know well, they don't find anything particularly great about it, other than the PvP. For them only of course.

Not sure if it's been answered, but what's going to happen to Justice Points? Will they be used to by things like heirlooms still, or will all currency be turned into Valor Points?